How did Windows 95 get permission to put the Weezer video Buddy Holly on the CD?
devblogs.microsoft.com120 points by ingve 7 hours ago
120 points by ingve 7 hours ago
Microsoft went crazy with Windows 95 marketing and release.
They also spent 3m (reported between 8m-15m at the time though -- which was massive for its day) on licensing Stones' Start Me Up.And they actually sent some shitty live version which would have avoided paying their old bassist. Jerks.
The hype was real though. I can still remember installing the floppy version on one of my first PCs. The first start up was like Star Trek level awe. It was so radically different and cool. Imho, Windows 95 is probably one of, if not, the most important software release of all time. Shaped how PC technology was used for the next 4 decades and still going strong.
I miss the 90s where every next iteration or release of hardware/software was generally a huge improvement. Like going from a 120mb hard drive to 1.6gb disk. Or getting your first CD-ROM after only having floppies, or CD-Writer (parents bought a 1x SCSI CDR the first year consumer ones came out -- made lots of coasters). Dial up to cable internet. The feeling of experiencing those new technologies was unmatched. It created such a since of awe, inspiration and wild imagination of possibilities. I don't get that feeling much these days.
The ad, for the curious:
I'm so grateful for flat LCD screens. Man, all those CRT boxes. Yikes.
The rest of this video, it doesn't look like the world has changed all that much since 1995. Computing just kind of looks the same. I guess minus the lack of phones in everyone's hands.
There were stories floating around at the time of people who were interested in buying it, having no idea what it was, not owning a computer and not realizing you needed one to use it.
Decades later Apple put U2 on everyone's iPhone and people got mad... (/s, yeah the album was a gift on people's account, ready to download to the phone but not taking space otherwise, but I would've found it obnoxious too).
This video was also on the CD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc .. holy smokes, let's rewind time 30 years, where the presidential sex scandal was singular, consensual, and was actually a scandal!
Sony wasted several gigs of the very small (32g to 120g) and very expensive ssds of the time with 2 copies of a Spider Man 3 movie pre-loaded onto several different laptops. One copy in the normal installed fs, another copy in the recovery partition.
And you couldn't even watch the movie unless you also paid to unlock it.
You could delete the normal copy if you even knew it was there and then also used a disk usage util to FIND the actual file. But you couldn't do anything about the copy in the recovery image except delete the recovery partition and basically wipe & repartition the drive and do your own fresh install.
... That is the most Sony thing ever lol
Indeed.
I don't know how Sony could top this, except possibly by also suing everyone.
The perception was: my iTunes library is mine, and it's invasive for Apple to put something in there without my permission.
Whereas: the Windows 95 CD is Microsoft's, Microsoft is free to put what they want on there. I bet most people who weren't nerds or curious kids never even found it!
Music videos on the Windows 95 CD didn't occupy space on your hard disk, either. As long as the operating system still fit on the CD-ROM, it didn't matter what other extras were on it.
And at the same time, Apple claimed it was the biggest ever album release by number of downloads, or something like that. They were not only messing with our libraries, they were claiming we wanted it and were in fact U2 fans.
Because it auto-played when you didn't want to.
If you had Spotify running and then pressed the quick-play on your phones it would continue where it was, but after a reboot the iPhone would auto-play from Apple Music instead if Spotify hadn't been started.
So tapping play on your headphones would start those damn U2 songs "by accident" because it's the only thing that was on the Apple Music accounts we aren't using.. yeah no thanks.
THIS WAS THE ISSUE 100% - every single time I rode in a car with an iPhone connected to the ICE, that damn U2 album would autoplay.
There was something about iTunes at that time where every time I started my car it would connect to my phone and start playing that U2 album regardless of what I had been listening to earlier. It just would not go away.
There's still something about CarPlay that does that kind of thing but not tied to a specific song. I'll be in my car listening to the car's radio, with my phone on its mount but inactive and all is well. The phone connected wirelessly to CarPlay when I started the car, but I'm not using any CarPlay features on this trip.
Then I need to activate the phone (say I'm pulling into the McDonalds parking lot and need to look at the McD app to get my drive thru pickup code for my order), so I tap it and swipe up...and the car switches to playing in whatever app I last used in CarPlay such as Podcasts or Spotify.
If I hit the media button to bring up the car's media selection screen and switch it back to radio that plays for a few seconds and then it switches back to CarPlay.
If on the phone I go to the now playing thingy in control center and hit the gizmo for selecting where to play I can explicitly switch it from CarPlay to iPhone Speaker and then it stops messing with the radio.
Some Googling and some asking LLMs turned up that a lot of people have problems with CarPlay overriding the car's entertainment system and apparently nobody has a fully satisfactory way to deal with it. Some people have addressed it by using Shortcuts automation to pause playback whenever the phone wakes up. They still get interrupted, but at least it doesn't keep interrupting.
I have a 2010 Honda. I found a usb port in the glove box. When I plug in my phone there is a 50% chance it will start playing my iTunes library alphabetically. (I get a Neville Brothers song, which isn’t so bad, I put it in there)
That’s a very confident recount given that it’s completely false. Good for you that you’ve memory-holed it. But don’t turn around and act like everyone else was insane.
Maybe you don’t remember iTunes mechanics at the time, but this “gift” as you call it would get in the way all the time. I’d always end up accidentally playing it. It’d always be present in library views when I did not care for it. It couldn’t be truly removed until Apple built a custom web page where you could request it to be removed from your account.
Nobody cared because nobody knew what an mp3 was in 1995. Most people - everyone but a minority of tech-minded audio producers - considered digital audio on a computer just a novelty. It took another four years until the public started to associate a music collection with the computer (ie: 1999, when Napster came out).
I think there were two problems with the U2 thing...
First, U2's general public perception as far as grandstanding[0]...
I think the bigger subconscious part was, at the time, Apple stuff was still premium price compared to most other brands, and the consumer perceived price of a U2 album, i.e. "It would cost me 10-15$ to buy this at Media Play^W^W FYE^W Best buy or wherever, couldn't they have made the contract price 10-15$ (which back then may have been as much as 5-10% of cost) cheaper"?
Cause I know an ex-partner bitched about that.
And, to other's comments, they bitched about the bono stuff popping up randomly playing music...[1]
[0] - I mean there was a whole south park episode about Bono's grandstanding...
[1] - Interestingly, the South Park episode was good therapy for her.
I don’t remember U2 being a gift being ready to download. It was automatically put on all my devices in iTunes. I think it’s still there but I use Spotify instead of iPods and iTunes.
> holy smokes, let's rewind time 30 years, where the presidential sex scandal was singular, consensual, and was actually a scandal!
Or 11 years, when the scandal was that the president wore a tan suit [1]:
> U.S. representative Peter King, a member of the Republican Party, deemed the suit's color combined with the subject matter of terrorism to be "unpresidential". He went on: "There's no way, I don't think, any of us can excuse what the president did yesterday. I mean, you have the world watching"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_tan_suit_controve...
The lesson of tan suit learned by modern politicians: if you don't feed the media plenty of juicy things to be made into outrage pornography they will invent some. Much better to do the inventing yourself and keep people afraid and angry in the direction of the other guy.
Imagine that's the worst that happens to "your" library. Good times. We really need to bring the idea of ownership back.
https://www.howtogeek.com/playstation-is-deleting-tv-shows-f...
https://www.npr.org/2009/07/24/106989048/amazons-1984-deleti...
Yes, yes. Everything comes back to personal property and freedoms. Whatever. Americans are so tiring.
Apple also put the music video for The Old Apartment by Barenaked Ladies on the Mac OS 8 CD.
Honestly it was the cover art and title, not the album itself. Without context, it’s easy for all of our internet-jaded minds to get a very wrong idea about what the album relates to.
And your music library is a very personal thing. For some people, it represents part of their identity. It can feel wrong to have something you may not like or agree with stuck in there.
It was much worse than just adding it to your library as a gift. The cover art for the album[1] would appear in seemingly random places on your phone. And there was literally zero way to remove it, until there was such an uproar that Apple had to make a special tool.
Apple spent money on this and they really, really wanted to force feed it to every Apple user (not unlike their F1 movie venture). It was incredibly obnoxious.
1 - And it isn't homophobic to note that the Songs of Innocence cover art looked a bit like you were browsing Grindr or something. People have the right to have the opinion that having that image suddenly being featured on their phone might be misinterpreted by others.
... It's a father trying to protect his son from the world's dangers. Not every picture of two men is sexual.
... It's a shirtless man hugging the waist of another shirtless man. The cover art doesn't even have any text on it, but instead is just a picture of a couple of shirtless dudes in an incredibly weird pose. Yeah, I'm sure lots of fathers find themselves in scenes just like this. Totes normal.
"Not every picture of two men is sexual."
Yes, no shit. Of course on HN someone would try this morally righteous horseshit, especially hilarious when it's served with a side of "Duh, of course!"
But you know what the picture represents because you were quite literally told how to interpret it. I don't want some picture I didn't ask for suddenly appearing on my lock screen (because most of us actually had empty libraries, so when this "gift" was added and the device did its fun "autoplay" nonsense, it would suddenly be active media), walking around saying to anyone who might catch site "Oh don't worry, it's an artistic image of a father protecting his son or something"
I wasn't told how to interpret it, I saw an unusual picture and, where you apparently jumped the conclusion that it was two men that were obviously about to have sex and that it would be a scandalous statement on your own sexuality if anyone were to see you with that picture, I chose to look up what the explanation was. I can only imagine how much you must clutch your pearls when naval aviators play volleyball together in the movies.
In this vastly unlikely passive aggressive hypothetical scenario, you're imagining that a random person who might see your screen would be as triggered by the image as you were. Most people had figured out by then that two men together are no more offensive or evil than a man and a woman.
Edie is also married to Paul Simon of all people. The story of how they got together is very sweet.
> let's rewind time 30 years, where the presidential sex scandal was singular, consensual, and was actually a scandal
You're right: now we learned that same ex-president was frequenting Epstein's island. Did that ex- president have sex with trafficked women (Ghislaine Maxwell is in jail for sex-trafficking and she was a known friend of the Clintons btw) on Epstein's island? Was it consensual?
I’m a huge fan of “be that as it may” to stop arguments that are essentially “yeah, but…!” This is a prime example.
BE THAT AS IT MAY, that’s not what we are talking about. This isn’t a Facebook comments section.
The point remains. Back then, one ordinary affair was a scandal. Now, the president can rape many little girls and throw the resulting babies out to sea and nothing happens to him, it's not a scandal.
'Consensual' sex between a 50 year old President - the most powerful man in the world - and a 21 year old intern. Yeah right.
Clinton had a decades-long history of being a sexual predator. He was repeatedly accused of rape. He was also active with his friendship with Epstein during those years, which I think everybody understands what that means at this point.
Always enjoy Raymond Chen's musings.
My sister and I were so excited to discover this on the CD as we were clicking through every folder. Awesome song that kicked off a love of the blue album, Pinkerton and the green album. (I had off-campus lunch privileges, so was sent to Borders to pick up copies of the green album on release day.)
We'd heard of Happy Days, but we didn't know if the show was like it was portrayed in the video. We may have thought the band was from Wisconsin. I don't think either of us ever became Happy Days fans.
> My sister and I were so excited to discover this on the CD as we were clicking through every folder.
This was a common experience back then, you got ahold of some new "piece of software" and you started discovering new stuff in it.
My fondest memory ever is one day in February 2001 browsing through the Windows 98 Add/Remove Windows Components dialog and realizing I could install the same Desktop Themes I remembered from like 1996 from my friend who had been lucky enough to have Plus! for Windows 95 (which had, years before, disappeared from his computer in that endless virus/reinstall cycle that characterized those times). Next day I showed the themes to said friend and we were speechless.
It was this promise of endless discovery that made me want to study CS.
I want to give a huge shout out to the UK magazine PC Format for the most absolute banger 90s magazine CD that I ever encountered.
It didn't just have Demos of new games, if you poked around you'd find that it had "this cool program called Scream Tracker 3" and a whole bunch of these ".MOD files" that played music that sounded like a CD![0]
[0] - Well, it was the 90s, and typical bundled multimedia speakers were so bad you couldn't tell the difference...
> I had off-campus lunch privileges, so was sent to Borders to pick up copies of the green album on release day.
What kind of college doesn't allow students to leave for lunch? Lord.
Probably a US high school, where off-campus lunch is usually reserved for older students.
That's fine...never heard high school grounds referred to as a campus before so assumed college.
This is fairly common in warmer climes in the US like California. Rather than have a monolithic high school building with lots of wasted space for hallways they will have a bunch of smaller buildings that students go between outside. They are "campuses" in the same sense that various tech companies call their cluster of buildings a "campus".
I remember watching a TV show set in socal (Beverly Hills 90210 maybe?) in the late 80s I think? And them having high schools and even lockers outdoors just blew my mind.
Others covered it. This was high school, not college. :) it was upperclassmen only and your parents or bad grades could get the privilege revoked.
School grounds are also commonly called campuses in the US, not just colleges. Our high school called it “off-campus lunch”.
High school ... 20+ years ago probably
That's fine...never heard high school grounds referred to as a campus before so assumed college.
Our family's Packard Bell in 1996 came with a full-motion video game called Silent Steel. Coming from a 486, FMV video games sure felt like the future.
It was pretty much Choose Your Own Adventure, but with video. You had to know the exact sequence of actions to get to a "good" ending, and apparently there were several endings. For the mid 90's, the script, acting, and sets (and CGI) were actually not half-bad. But mapping out all the choices that didn't kill you while watching the same set of clips over and over was not as much fun as it sounds.
That sounds really familiar—I think that must have been on my Packard Bell from that era too.
Mine also came with a CD-ROM game called The Journeyman Project. I think there was also a "Family Cooking" CD with recipes and maybe demo videos as well, and also a home repair CD (presumably intended as the equivalent of home ec and shop, for female and male users, now that I think about it), along with Microsoft Encarta and some sort of health guide on CD-ROM, maybe from the Mayo Clinic.
I also remember this recording (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/d3HThl75oug?app=desktop) of a man with a thick accent saying "computers today need more power: the power of sound," which I guess was a sound card demo, though I can't remember where it was on the computer.
Sega CD had several games like that too. "Night Trap" was the most well known, and gained some notoriety for a bit of laughably tame footage.
As a teenager I found this video on the Windows 95 CD without context and for some time after I thought that Weezer was a 60's band that just had a style way ahead of their time.
Crowding around our first ever computer, a 120mhz pentium with 16mb of RAM and a 1.6gb hard disk, watching that Weezer video on the CRT monitor with my whole family is a cherished memory.
I personally prefer Windows XP including David Byrne's "Like Humans Do" as the demo track for Windows Media Player
Any time you get mad about a streaming service who seems to have changed music or a credits clip for a TV show or movie, this is basically why.
To get the rights to use things in technologies that didn't exist when the media was created, you often have to go back to everyone involved and get their permission. Sometimes they don't say yes, or they aren't findable, or just aren't alive, and it's not clear who owns the rights anymore.
This isn't as much of a problem with newer media, because contracts now specify what happens with new technologies, but old contracts were often limited to specific technologies.
Apple put Barenaked Ladies’ The Old Apartment video on the Mac OS 8 CD as a QuickTime demo
I thought it was the song “one week.” But a quick search shows that song was on the MacOS 8.5 disk.
There were always little interesting stuff on those discs. Some music cds at the time came with “macromedia” stuff. Wonder if that still works..
Henry Winkler (the Fonz) went on to become a big-name Hollywood producer—he executive produced the original MacGyver—so he was probably one of the easiest to contact.
IIRC there was also an Edie Brickell video.
This music video was the reason we decided to upgrade the CD-ROM drive on our family computer, since it could not play without stuttering on our existing one.
I think folks forget this was part of it. PC's were being sold as supporting "multimedia" and Intel was selling chips with "Multimedia extensions". Just playing a video at all was a big deal.
Video was rare. You weren't downloading videos over 56k dialup (I remember leaving the modem running all night to download movie trailers from Apples Trailers website (only available in Quicktime format of course)
> You weren't downloading videos over 56k dialup
Sure you could.
Not so much in the 90s; But during 2003/2004, with a 56k modem, an unlimited dialup plan, a second phone line, software to redial when the internet dropped, and bittorrent: I was managing to download roughly 150-200MB of data per day (sometimes more)
I could download one of those 350 DivX/Xvid rips every second day. At one point, someone was posting 60MB .rmvb encodes of Stargate SG1. From memory, the quality wasn't great, but I could download 2-3 per day.
I wish I still had some of those 60MB .rmvb encodes, just so I could see exactly how bad the quality was. But I deleted them all, and they seem to have disappeared from the internet.
The "RealMedia Variable Bitrate" codec was essentially a prototype of H.264 (which is still widely used today) but predating it by a year or two.
This is quite short and doesn't really contain any insights or details that aren't simply obvious or easily assumed.
Yeah, it's a shame. I usually enjoy Raymond Chen's posts, but this doesn't tell me anything particularly interesting other than that the band didn't know. The main question I have is: why this video? What's the story behind the choice?
Back in 1997 or so I bought an ATI video card that also had a Weezer video on the CD. I remember being amazed that it could play the video at 1024x768 with just a little bit of tearing.
The Weezer video was quirky, funny, creative, catchy and appealing to multiple generations. A stroke of genius by Microsoft.
IIRC, I was able to watch the videos on my 486. It was quite something being able to do that l, while in Windows 95 and switching between apps. Prior to that, I’d only seen FMV in a few video games.
We used to see who had the most powerful PC by seeing how many videos we could play at once. Long with Robroy and whatever other video was on there.
It's well known that Bill Gates's favorite band is Weezer, so this feels unsurprising.
Licensing?
I read the whole thing (all several paragraphs of it) and the answer is, indeed: Licensing.
It's approximately the least-interesting article I've read this year.
I found it somewhat interesting that they had to track down all the actors from Happy Days. You would think that there would be one single point of contact with whomever made the video, cause it's not like they were using the footage of the actors in a new way.
But honestly, I'm ok with it being only somewhat interesting. When you write as many posts as Mr. Chen does, they aren't all going to be bangers.
> You would think that there would be one single point of contact with whomever made the video, cause it's not like they were using the footage of the actors in a new way.
That depends. Licensing is a weird nuanced beast. The original video could have received a license to broadcast on something like MTV. MS didn't want to broadcast it, but distribute it. That's an entirely different thing in the licensing world. The fees also change depending on broadcast/distribute. The number of units would be considered and fees based accordingly.
Is there any way to make this submission even less interesting? Perhaps we can speculate about parts being written by AI. Did you see any em dashes?
It's just a journal style entry, its not bad that its boring, but its so bland. It will become LLM fodder I'm sure.
This is Edie Brickell erasure!
"Hey, did anyone try the fish tonight?"
"It's not so good, Al"
I must confess that these kind of corporate storie make me throw up in my mouth. (Yes, I have karma to burn, hit me)
I liked this one because that video on that CD was a big part of my childhood.
But yeah, same here. The worse ones are the ones from Apple / Steve Jobs that are meant to be cute and quirky but are actually just examples of sociopathy.